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<title>You see with contempt I am not what you dreamt by The_random_Ravenclaw</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28738632">You see with contempt I am not what you dreamt</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_random_Ravenclaw/pseuds/The_random_Ravenclaw'>The_random_Ravenclaw</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Fics set in the same universe so they're kind of connected but also standalones [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Mechanisms (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bigotry &amp; Prejudice, Loneliness, Mentioned Aurora/Nastya, Mentioned unethical science, Mob Mentality, Multi, No beta we die like mortals meeting the Mechanisms, Polymechs - Freeform, Public dismemberment, Raphaella la Cognizi Backstory, Raphaella la Cognizi mechanised herself, Raphaella-centric, Revenge, The Mechanisms-Typical Temporary Character Death, The tags makes this sound very dark but it's not graphic, There's not enough sad Raphaella content in this fandom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:21:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,624</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28738632</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_random_Ravenclaw/pseuds/The_random_Ravenclaw</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of how Raphaella lost her wings, built her own and finally found her place in the universe</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Raphaella la Cognizi/The Mechanisms Ensemble</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Fics set in the same universe so they're kind of connected but also standalones [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2106939</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>39</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>You see with contempt I am not what you dreamt</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Fun fact, this fic was supposed to be a few throwaway lines in another fic, but then I got some Ideas and it snowballed from there because I have a bad case of Raphaella brainrot. I hope you like it!</p><p>Title from Frankenstein because I listened to it and the AI's parts gave me Raph feelings specific to this fic</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Ever since Raphaella got old enough to interact with the world she couldn’t fit in on her home planet. As a child she always wanted to explore, to learn more and when she became a little older her goal became to expand the limits of what science could do. She wanted to understand the world she lived in, but the people of her planet didn’t share her ambitions. They were content with staying in the town they’d grown up in and living like the previous generations had done, never even asking a question as obvious to Raphaella as how and why they could fly.</p><p>At first her parents humoured her thirst for knowledge, a thirst that had been there as long as Raphaella could remember. They told her stories about how they thought the world worked, but when she was no longer content with explanations mostly based on religion and magic, the stories they told her turned into warnings instead. </p><p>The warning she remembered the best was a story her mother told her once. It was the story of a young boy who flew too close to the sun despite being told to stay humble and not fly too high. His wings caught fire and he died when they could no longer carry him, causing him to fall into the sea. She knew it was meant to illustrate how only bad things could come out of reaching for more than you were supposed to, but that wouldn’t stop her.</p><p>It was far too late to discourage Raphaella from searching knowledge by telling her silly stories and she told her mother that the story was scientifically impossible and therefore not relevant. She’d talked to one of the strange wing-less people by the spaceship dock and he’d told her about how space worked. With those facts she could easily disprove the story.</p><p>If you tried to fly in space, where the sun was, you’d die from oxygen deprivation and because of gravity, the boy would fall into the sun if he got too close, not back to the planet. Their planet was way too far away from the sun for its gravity to affect someone close enough to the sun to catch fire and besides, it would be impossible to fly that far with wings alone. No, Raphaella knew better than to listen to their warnings about what happened to those who sought to understand. </p><p>Her parents weren’t the only ones that tried to keep her away from science. Pretty much all the adults in the village tried to stop her if she told them about the exciting things she’s learned. It was disheartening for the young girl to be met by such reactions, but that wouldn’t stop her. She needed to know more.</p><p>The only people that supported her were the wing-less people from other planets that stopped by to trade sometimes. Some of them would bring her books on different scientific subjects and explain things to her. They never stayed for long though, and it could be months or years between the visits. They were her largest source of knowledge but couldn’t count as friends.</p><p>Despite their different values and world-views, Raphaella did her best to make friends with the other children in town. She tried to connect with them, but at some point in her early teen years she realised that those she tentatively counted as her friends knew each other much better than they knew her and preferred each other’s company over hers. </p><p>She honestly didn’t know why, just that it wasn’t because of her scientific ambitions. She hadn’t dared to tell them about the science she was so passionate about, afraid that her peers would reject her just like the adults did. Maybe there was just something wrong with her. They made making friends seem so easy, so why couldn’t she do it, just be like everyone else for once?</p><p>None of them outright told her that they didn’t want to be friends with her, but it was easy for her to notice it anyways. She saw it the way she was never invited to hang out with them and how she had no idea what to say when trying to carry a conversation outside of a group setting, because she didn’t actually know anyone. Even in a group setting she felt hopelessly like an outsider. She would never be an undeniable part of a group, just someone floating around the edges of every friend group, surrounded by people yet lonely.</p><p>She still tried to talk with them of course, tried to win them over with her new-found knowledge. There were no others she could make friends with after all. Maybe they’d like her if she showed them her favourite experiments or told them some fun facts? </p><p>That plan didn’t work out at all. They turned it against her and told her she was too curious, that knowledge would only lead to bad things. They said it was dangerous to want more than the life offered in the small town and accused her of trying to corrupt them too. It was clear that they only parroted what their parents had told them, but that wasn’t much of a consolation for Raphaella when she cried herself to sleep.</p><p>She used to be allowed to sit with them, although everyone knew that she wasn’t really part of the group, but now she was completely shut out. There was no longer any point in pretending she had friends. It had only ever been an illusion, but it was a pretty one she’d wanted to believe in. Her family tried harder than before to keep her from experimenting and reading about astrophysics (her current interest), so she couldn’t count on them either. Raphaella was on her own, just like she’d always been. It was just that this time she couldn’t pretend otherwise.</p><p>When it was clear she couldn’t be what they wanted, she stopped trying. For how could she give up this pursuit of knowledge when it could do so much good for her planet and bring her so much satisfaction? Raphaella lived for and breathed science, and to understand everything it was possible to understand had been her dream for as long as she could remember. She couldn’t give it up, not for a normal life she didn’t even want. Still, the science never fully managed to drown out the ever-present loneliness.</p><p>Their determination to stop her from learning only served to strengthen her resolve. She ordered more books, devised numerous experiments and combed through all the libraries in close enough range for every single scrap of information they could offer. People had whispered about her for a long time, but now the rumours spread faster than before. Soon, everyone in her hometown knew about the misfit who’d abandoned their beliefs for cold, hard numbers. Raphaella ignored the whispers to the best of her ability and pushed on.</p><p>At this time in her life, she kept her experiments ethic and she never sought to harm anyone. Even though they’d shut her out, she knew that her knowledge could bring good to her planet and if she could only make them understand that everything would be fine (yet another illusion, but it brought her the hope needed to go on). She hadn’t done anything wrong except for going outside the limits of how they thought she should live her life.</p><p>Despite that, the rumours about her spread and grew steadily worse in the following years as she withdrew from the town’s social life. Suddenly she was no longer just a little too curious for her own good and about to get hurt by her hubris, they said she was aiming to destroy everything their civilization stood for and she’d kill their children as a sacrifice to hedonistic gods. </p><p>It went so far that her own family disowned her, but they’d never been there for her anyways so it wasn’t much of a loss (Except that it hurt inside. She’d still believed that they cared about her even though it’d been a long time since they showed it). </p><p>It was all bullshit of course. Raphaella couldn’t find any scientific evidence for the existence of any deities and she was only aiming to improve people’s lives with the knowledge she’d earned. Couldn’t they just understand that living a quiet life as someone’s wife would kill her with boredom? She was meant for more, she was meant to be a scientist.</p><p>Rumours can be powerful though, regardless of their validity. One day, shortly after Raphaella turned nineteen, the public hate towards her reached a critical point. She was dragged from her lab to the town square, where the entire town had assembled. They were watching her with disgust. Her own family stood beside the hateful strangers, as well as those she’d once called friends. </p><p>In front of everyone she’d ever known, they took her wings as punishment for things she hadn’t done. They cut off her beautiful wings and forced her to watch, covered in blood from the wounds on her back, as they put them on a pyre and set it on fire. She watched as her wings went up in flames and with them, a part of her died. The part that, despite everything she’d endured, cared for the people of her planet.</p><p>They called it a warning. Said that she should’ve known to stay inside the lines, that she would never roam the sky again. They’d taken her freedom and every person that saw her would know of her crimes, because burning someone’s wings was the harshest punishment available, even worse than death. They told her she’d die disgraced, lost and broken without the means to ever fly again. </p><p>She was left alone afterwards, thrown on the cold cobblestone in a small dried puddle of her own blood, sobbing from pain and grief. They’d at least had the courtesy to bandage her back before leaving, but it did nothing to alleviate the pain. When she finally managed to stand again, the sun had long since gone down and the pyre had burnt out. She sifted through the ashes, but there was no trace of her wings left. Not a single bone remained.</p><p>It reminded her of the story about the boy who fell from the sky in a burst of flame, dying for the crime of forging his own path. There, among the ashes of her innocence, standing in the middle of a deserted town square, Raphaella decided that she wouldn’t be like him. Her wings had gone up in flame, but she wasn’t dead and there was still time to prove that she could do what she wanted. She could rise from the ashes like phoenix, wouldn’t that be poetic?</p><p>They’d already taken everything from her, so there was nothing left to lose. She would make them regret taking the sky from her. She would soar again, she would live and learn all that the universe had to offer. The empathy she’d had for her fellow humans was gone now. She used to be good, but what use was there in trying to be good when she’d already been punished for being bad? She could just as well become the demon they already thought she was and haunt their nightmares.</p><p>The next two years passed in a haze, gone in a flurry of learning and experimenting, of bending the universe to her will. She stole and modified a small spaceship to go off-planet for a while, seamlessly blending in among the wingless humans that populated other sectors of space. </p><p>There was something more to it than just escaping the hateful looks she received behind her back though. She felt a bone-deep certainty that her travels had a purpose outside of finding new and exciting science, she was searching for something. There was a force driving her and she’d know what it was driving her towards when she found it.</p><p>Ethics were thrown to the side and she started experimenting on humans she came across. Raphaella la Cognizi didn’t care about right and wrong anymore, just about whether it was interesting or not. She wasn’t the at times naïve girl she used to be, the girl that wanted to do good to the people that betrayed her, she was brutal and cruel if it meant she gained something from it, usually knowledge. Raphaella was sneaky about it though, there was no use in being killed or imprisoned when she had a goal to reach, whatever it was. </p><p>Eventually she found it. A hunch led her to find the notes of a mysterious doctor hidden in a forgotten corner of some long-abandoned archive. They were notes on how to replace body parts with metal, which would grant the recipient immortality. Raphaella laughed when she found them, breaking the silence of the dusty stacks. This was what she’d been searching for.</p><p>She could build herself new wings and soar higher than the people of her planet could ever have dreamt of doing. She would live and she would thrive, no stupid mortality to stop her relentless pursuit for knowledge. There would be time to learn everything she ever cared to know. As a bonus, she could burn her people to the ground just like they’d burned her wings.</p><p>It took some time to build and perfect her design, but at the young age of twenty two, Raphaella la Cognizi died for the first of many times, only to wake up again with a familiar weight on her back. It had worked. For the first time in years she soared the skies, but this time on metal wings made from shining brass and spite. They’d tried to break her, but she’d come back stronger than before.</p><p>Everything was perfect. Except that the metal just wasn’t the same as the light brown feathers she used to have. She missed their softness, but being soft and vulnerable wasn’t something she could allow herself to be, not when her new life was built on being strong as the metal on her back and never relying on people other than herself.</p><p>She returned to the town she grew up in and made sure that those who hurt her suffered. Safe to say, there were none left alive to tell the story of how a woman they all thought was dead, a woman they still told cautionary tales about, returned. How she swooped down from the sky she’d been banished from on unnatural metal wings, like a demon there to destroy all they’d ever known with a creative use of her own inventions.</p><p>It was satisfying, and Raphaella calmed down a little after taking her revenge, but it hadn’t been all she hoped for. She was no longer plagued by the feverish drive of revenge, but the feelings about her childhood and adolescence didn’t disappear like she thought they would. She’d destroyed the people who hurt her, so why couldn’t they leave her mind alone? It was supposed to be over now.</p><p>Still, there was no use in thinking about the past when the universe was filled to the brim with things to learn and understand. This was only her beginning. She travelled the stars alone for a few centuries to find answers to her questions and sure, the science was satisfying, but it wasn’t enough. This life was much better than living on her old planet, but Raphaella craved human company, the one thing she never had. </p><p>It was even harder to find friends now. Even if she found someone they’d die only a few decades later, leaving her alone again. Raphaella told herself that company wasn’t worth the pain of losing people over and over for the rest of her eternal life, so she steered clear of others. She’d always gotten by on her own so she should be able to manage without company, but deep inside she longed for someone to share her discoveries with, someone to care about. It just couldn’t be a mortal. </p><p>She knew there had to be others like her though, the notes she used to build her wings were based on the mechanisation of several others, including notes on how they reacted to the procedure. It had worked, so there must be other immortals out there, but they could be anywhere in the vast universe. Good thing she had eternity to find them.</p><p>That was her life, science and loneliness, until she met Marius by chance (Or maybe it wasn’t only chance. If Jonny’s theory about the Narrative as a driving force of the universe, or at least for the Mechanisms, was to be believed, much in her life could be explained. Still, there was no proof for it other than occurrences that could just as well coincidence. Maybe she should conduct some experiments on the subject sometime). </p><p>He wasn’t one of the other immortals mentioned in the notes and the only thing he said about how he acquired the arm was that he hadn’t done it himself, but for once Raphaella tamed her curiosity. She didn’t want to talk about what led to her own mechanisation, so it’d be hypocritical not to respect his decision.</p><p>They decided to travel the universe together and quickly grew close. Raphaella had been lonely her entire life, but now she had a companion to spend immortality with. Her life was finally filled with the warmth she’d been lacking for so long. He’d brought a violin and she decided to learn how to play the keyboard so they could make music together. Despite the occasional trouble caused by two heavily traumatised immortals trying to get along, those years were the best ones she’d experienced so far.</p><p>After a few decades together they found a flyer for one of the Mechanisms’ concerts and decided to check it out in case they were the missing immortals. They saw the lead singer get back up after being shot by one of the others and decided to approach the crew after the concert. </p><p>At first they’d been a little apprehensive about her whole mad scientist thing, but as it became clear that she’d only experiment on them with their informed consent they accepted her. It helped that Marius could confirm that only mortals were used as test subjects against their will, and the Mechanisms hadn’t cared much about those in a long time. </p><p>Raphaella had finally found her place in the universe and after a few millennia, when Nastya forced everyone to ‘actually talk about their obvious feelings for once because I can’t handle this level of pining anymore, it’s painful to watch’, she became part of the polycule that formed.</p><p>Nastya wasn’t part of it, claiming that she only felt attraction to machines and that Aurora was more than enough for her. It would also be weird, considering that she and Jonny considered each other siblings. She was still family to all of them though and Raphaella always looked forward to the times when they collaborated (the rest of the crew dreaded it). </p><p>Each relationship within the polycule was different, but Raphaella knew she was in love with the others and loved in return, although that love took different expressions for each crew member. Their relationship was maybe an inevitable result of being stuck together for so many years because it was impossible to not grow at least a little fond of the others after a few decades. </p><p>Even though all of them were violent and cruel souls mostly without morals, they cared about each other and allowed themselves to be vulnerable for once. It was beautiful, she supposed, that a crew of so wildly different people could fit together like they did, like puzzle pieces slotting into place. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did and it was hers. Her family.</p><p>Raphaella could never fully regret her choice to become immortal, not like some of the other crew members did (But they hadn’t had as much of a choice, had they? You can’t think about the implications of immortality and make an informed decision when you’re dying, you just want to live). </p><p>There were days when she wished there was an end in sight, maybe not an immediate one but still there, the promise of an eventual rest, days when the weight of eternity felt as heavy as the metal wings on her back. Sometimes she even missed the innocent girl she used to be, so far from the person she’d become.</p><p>Yet she could never truly regret her choice of immortality and who she was now. Her mechanisation was a choice coloured by spite and a lust for revenge, but it was still hers. She’d wanted infinity, even though she hadn’t fully understood what it meant at the time. </p><p>Sometimes she felt like mechanising herself had been inevitable. Even if they hadn’t burned her wings she was sure that she would’ve eventually left the planet in her quest for knowledge and found those notes regardless of what led her to space. Maybe she would’ve hesitated at first, but she could feel it in her bones, with a certainty that came from lifetimes of following stories: that Raphaella Cognizi mechanised herself was inescapable. </p><p>Besides, she much preferred living forever with the people she loved to living and dying on an unimportant planet, never to understand the universe. She was so much more than what they’d wanted her to be and she’d learned so much more than they could ever hope to understand. She’d reclaimed the sky and flew higher than they could’ve ever dreamt of. Raphaella had carved her own destiny with tooth and claw and it’d been worth the pain.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you so much for reading, I hope you liked it! Please consider leaving kudos or comments if you enjoyed because those are like instant happiness to me (I am a simple person, give me validation and I will cherish you forever)</p><p>I'll post the fic this was originally a part of in the same series, so you can look forward to that if you'd like something more fluffy and light-hearted featuring Science and giant octokittens</p><p>You can find me on tumblr <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/blog/therandomravenclw"> @therandomravenclw </a></p></blockquote></div></div>
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